The midterms are done, and only one question remains: How does it all affect Donald Trump?
That’s all anyone cares about, really. So let’s get down to it: Donald Trump tweeted about the “tremendous success” of the midterms, even though the Democrats recaptured the House. But just look at it from his perspective:
(1) Republicans overperformed expectations in the Senate. Where the president’s party normally loses ground in the midterms, Trump not only gained ground in the Senate, but gained more ground than Republicans thought they would. The Sean Hannitys of the world will sell this as the greatest victory since Austerlitz.
(2) The mini-Trumps did well. Sure, Corey Stewart lost his Senate race in Virginia, but Trump isn’t going to compete very hard in Virginia in 2020 anyway. And yes, Kris Kobach lost his governor’s race in Kansas, but Trump won Kansas by 20 points in 2016; he’s couldn’t lose it in 2020 if he tried.
But Ron DeSantis and Brian Kemp won in states that Trump will have to have. They won by beating the kind of progressive, minority candidates that Trump might have to face. And they won in come-from-behind races where the polls had them in trouble.
Eventually the Democratic House will make Trump’s life difficult. But for now, if you’re looking for confirmation bias—and by all accounts, that is the only kind of analysis Trump does—there was plenty of evidence to suggest that the answer is More Trump.
Rick Scott, one of the first major Republicans to endorse Trump, also won. And so did Beautiful Ted who—people sometimes forget this—once failed to endorse Trump from the stage of the Republican National Convention.
And Kevin Cramer beat Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota—which proved that a Trumpy Republican can even beat a conservative Democrat.
(3) The cucks lost. Carlos Curbelo, a mini-Rubio from Florida who was never down with the Trump program? Gone. Barbara Comstock, an establishment creature from Northern Virginia? The first incumbent to bite the dust. Denver’s Mike Coffman? Blown out.
Never forget that Trump’s primary adversary has always been the Republican party, not the Democrats. And the midterm elections went a long way toward completing his pacification of the GOP by purging the last few unreliable elements. So while Republicans may have lost positions of power, this has the effect of giving Trump more power over the Republican party itself.
(4) Trump’s political instincts were vindicated. All of the losers, like Paul Ryan, wanted Trump to campaign on tax cuts and the unemployment rate. Trump thought that he needed American Carnage, Part Deux. Which is why his closing arguments were all about immigration, racial division, and chaos.
And Trump was right. Or at least, he wasn’t wrong. Maybe Republicans would have done marginally better had Trump held to a more conventional script. But the party’s losses stayed within the expected parameters, so maybe not.
If the people in Trump’s orbit thought the president was hard to constrain before the election, just wait until they see him Wednesday morning. There will be no pivoting for re-election: The midterms will reinforce to Trump the idea that he intuits the political landscape better than anyone around him and that what he really needs to do is follow his gut.
Expect the administration to be loaded up with people who share that view as he begins restaffing over the next couple of weeks.
(5) American Carnage works. How do you run a fear-based campaign when the country is at peace, unemployment is under 4 percent, GDP growth is near the safe maximum, and wage growth is starting to show up across the board? It’s not easy, but Trump figured out how to do it.
Donald Trump has been nibbling around the edges of American politics for more than 20 years now and his message—in good times and bad—has always been that terrible things are just around the corner. And he managed to pull that off even in the current Edenic climate. If you think his 2020 re-election pitch is going to be “Morning in America,” you’re crazy.
It’s going to be unlike any campaign this country has ever seen.
